Welcome to the website for the 2024 NAMHO conference.  NAMHO is the National Association of Mining History Organisations with members based in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.

In the year 2000 an international mining conference was held in Cornwall, led by NAMHO member organisations.  In 2020, there were plans to hold a conference in Cornwall to celebrate 20 years since "InterNAMHO".  However, COVID scuppered those plans and the 2020 and 2021 conferences were cancelled.  Now we are please to welcome mine explorers and historians back to Cornwall for the 2024 conference..

The conference is based in Pool, Cornwall.   The main venue for the lectures and social events is Kernow Resilience Hub, just off the A30 in Pool, Redruth. Camping will be a short walk away.  Details of the venue can be found on their public website at kernowrh.com.

The conference will be held over a long weekend from Friday, 28th June to Wednesday, 3rd July 2024.   The venue will be open from 1200 on Friday 28th June.  More details are provided on this website.  Some events may fall outside the dates shown.

The theme of the conference is "Tin, copper, gold and ....".   In 2020 the conference was going to be titled "Tin, Copper and Gold" and the link between these topics was provided by the Nebra Sky Disc which is pictured in the heading for this website.   Details of the disc may be found on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebra_sky_disk) but in brief it was found in 1999 in Germany and eventually deposited in the State Museum of Prehistory at Halle.   The link with the conference lies in the fact that recent analysis* found that the gold used in the first phase was from the river Carnon in Cornwall, United Kingdom.   The tin present in the bronze was also of Cornish origin.  With the potential resurgence of mining for materials such as Lithium and with the continuing China Clay industry, we have retitled the conference to broaden the brief.

So Cornwall not only produced copper and tin (and slate and china clay and a little lead, cobalt and tungsten) but also gold.   Before, during and after the conference, opportunities will be provided to visit some of the sites.   These visits will be publicised through the Surface and Underground Trips pages on this site.   

Besides the lectures and visits, NAMHO Conferences have a tradition of providing a meeting place for like-minded people with opportunities to socialise and sometimes with appropriate local entertainment of some form.   To support this aim, a conference meal has been arranged for the Saturday night and there will be a suitably well-stocked bar run by the Hidden Earth team so you can be sure of not drinking it dry and of having reasonable prices.

A conference Tee-Shirt has been available to order on the booking form.  There is a range of sizes from small to 3XL.  The design incorporates the NAMHO logo and is shown to the left.  It will be printed in white on a black tee-shirt.  There might be one or two spares if you did not book in time.

We are grateful to the support given by Imerys/British Lithium who have provided the delegates' cotton tote bags and who are laying on a coach tour and packed lunches for the tour of their site.

To book on the conference, please follow the booking link above or go direct to the booking page.

* Ehser, Anja; Borg, Gregor; Pernicka, Ernst (2011). "Provenance of the gold of the Early Bronze Age Nebra Sky Disk, central Germany: geochemical characterization of natural gold from Cornwall". European Journal of Mineralogy. 23 (6), pp 895-910. Retrieved 12 November 2013.;